NOW IS NOT THE TIME FOR EMERGENCY POWERS.

I suspect that most of the time Thom Hartmann would trot out the list of industries the national government has effectively nationalized as examples of socializing the losses, and bad policy.

In the 1970s, in the wake of the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, President Richard Nixon oversaw the voluntary nationalization and transfer of 20 railroads into the newly created National Rail Passenger Corporation, now known as Amtrak.

In 1974 Congress created another nationalized entity to deal with freight rail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail), which absorbed dozens of failing rail companies. Conrail was government held until 1987, when it was privatized in the then-largest IPO in American history.

In 1984, when the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was in a crisis, President Ronald Reagan’s administration oversaw the FDIC nationalizing it by acquiring an 80 percent ownership share in the company; it wasn’t re-privatized until 1991, and was bought by Bank of America in 1994.

Also in the 1980s, after Reagan recklessly deregulated the Savings & Loan industry, bankers made off with billions leaving the wreckage of crushed S&Ls all across the nation.

When the government agency that insured them, FSLIC, went bankrupt itself in 1987, Reagan and Congress created an umbrella agency — the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) — to nationalize 747 of America’s S&Ls with assets of over $400 billion. Their assets were sold back into the private market in 1995 as the RTC shut itself down, having averted a 1929-style banking crisis through temporary nationalization.

When George W. Bush was handed the White House by five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, the nation’s airline security system was entirely in private hands.

They failed miserably on 9/11, so Bush didn’t even bother with the normal acquisition process that would protect the hundreds of small contractors running security at airports across the nation: he simply nationalized the entire system and created a government agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to take over airport and airline security.

President Bush also partially nationalized the nation’s airlines, creating the Air Transportation Stabilization Board that traded around $10 billion in loans to airlines in crisis (air traffic collapsed after 9/11) in exchange for company stock.

Those are the recent examples. The wartime examples from earlier in the twentieth century aren't any more encouraging.  It gets longer from here ...

Now, though, comes the chance to hamstring the production of crude oil in service of environmental goals.

If ever there was an industry that merited nationalization, the fossil fuel industry is it. They manipulate prices to both enhance profits and swing elections, bribe their way through the halls of Congress, and pump out a steady stream of lies about climate change. All while pouring hundreds of billions into the money bins of their morbidly rich CEOs, shareholders, and senior executives.

America has a long and proud history of taking on companies that put profits over the public good during a time of crisis. And we could acquire controlling interest of the nation’s three largest fossil fuel players — ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips — for, according to Robert Pollin writing at The American Prospect, fewer than a half-trillion dollars.

For less than a quarter of the cost of Trump’s billionaire tax cuts we could rapidly move a long way toward saving our nation and the world from climate destruction.  But is it even possible? Turns out that history says an emphatic, “Yes!”

Dip into Mr Pollin's essay, though, and consider the source.

If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC’s findings seriously, it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

A model has to capture the essential elements, and this is the same panel that had a doomsday warning by 1998 late in the Reagan administration.  We're still around, but the fear-mongering never ends.

Neither does the Utopian Wonkery.

The main argument for nationalizing the U.S. oil giants is straightforward. The single most important factor causing climate change is that we continue to burn oil, natural gas, and coal to produce energy. It follows that we must stop burning fossil fuels to have any chance of moving the global economy onto a viable climate stabilization path. By contrast, the purpose of private fossil fuel companies in the U.S. and elsewhere is precisely to make profits from selling oil, coal, and natural gas, no matter the consequences for the planet and regardless of how the companies may present themselves in various high-gloss, soft-focus PR campaigns.

With at least ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips under public control, the necessary phaseout of fossil fuels as an energy source could advance in an orderly fashion. The government could determine fossil fuel energy production levels and prices to reflect both the needs of consumers and the requirements of the clean-energy transition. This transition could also be structured to provide maximum support for the workers and communities that are presently dependent on fossil fuel companies for their well-being.

At least this generation of socialists is serious about creating shortages. The deprivation, in fact, is the point.

And yet, if we are going to take the climate emergency seriously, we cannot advocate for gasoline prices to fall back to pre-COVID levels. On behalf of saving the planet, we actually need all fossil fuel prices to remain high, and indeed, if anything, to increase still further. This is because high prices for oil, as well as for natural gas and coal, will discourage consumers from buying fossil fuels to meet their energy needs. Correspondingly, high fossil fuel prices will incentivize efforts to build a new energy infrastructure, whose two pillars will be high efficiency and renewable energy, in particular solar and wind power. A high-efficiency, renewable energy-dominant infrastructure will, among other things, deliver cheaper energy than our current fossil fuel–dominant system.

But that cannot happen in an instant. In the meantime, we cannot allow working-class and middle-class people to experience cuts in their living standards right now through high fossil fuel prices, while oil companies’ profits explode. How can we effectively address these equally valid, though competing, considerations?

I'd like to see the demonstration projects first.  I'd also like to have assurances that a government fossil fuel industry won't be a plaything for a different sort of politicians once the next "world is about to end" deadline passes without the world ending.

Just as with private companies, producing and selling fos­sil fuel energy generates huge revenues for state-owned enterprises. National development projects, lucrative careers, and political power—including Russia’s capacity to finance its invasion of Ukraine—all depend on continuing the flow of large fos­sil fuel revenues. We should therefore not expect that, in and of itself, public ownership of the U.S. oil giants will provide favorable conditions for fighting climate change, any more than public ownership has done so already in Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, or Iran.

In the U.S. case, we also have to recognize that a nationalized oil industry operating under something akin to a second Trump presidency would likely destroy any of the benefits of taking the industry out of private ownership. Such an administration could, among other options, sell the public oil firms to cronies, reversing any benefits that would have accrued from nationalization.

All such threats are real. Nevertheless, the climate emergency requires us to take big political risks. We therefore need to continue advancing a viable climate stabilization program in full recognition that, at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing such a program. The most straightforward solution to overcoming this obstacle is to eliminate the profit motive altogether from the companies whose business model continues to be predicated on destroying the planet.

That ought to give pause to the kind of advocate for major policy changes who looks enviously at emergency powers.

Even amid the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency”, and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play”. As the UNDP director, Achim Steiner, summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level”.

The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally yearned for less democracy, not more. Surely if we just had strongmen in power everywhere they could just make the hard decisions and put us on the right path – we wouldn’t have to mess with the constant vagaries of elections and lobbying and influence.

But this is wrong for at least one moral reason – strongmen capable of acting instantly on the climate crisis are also capable of acting instantly on any number of other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify were they allowed to talk. It’s also wrong for a number of practical ones.

Those practical problems begin with the fact that autocrats have their own vested interests to please – Modi campaigned for his role atop the world’s largest democracy on the corporate jet of Adani, the largest coal company in the subcontinent. Don’t assume for a minute that there’s not a fossil fuel lobby in China; right now it’s busy telling Xi that economic growth depends on more coal.

Exactly, and the Chinese coal lobby and that Trumpian fossil fuel lobby will have, in addition to the continued failure of the climate doomsday to materialize, the cruelty inherent in environmental deprivation to point to. "Asceticism for asceticism’s sake has been a feature of many ideologies (whether religious or otherwise), so it has not been a great surprise that it also features so prominently in the current climate agenda."

At least the religious ascetics generally had the good graces to go about in robe and sandals without requiring everybody else to be subject to the same deprivation.  The doomsday environmentalists, not so much.